FyunchClick

Oh, no, it's a TV tropes reference... there goes my afternoon. :'(

I think I have 0.25, 0.9 and 1.0.0.4 right now. I'll probably delete the older ones any day now as I've now reached the point in 1.0.0.4 where I've reached as far into space I was there and there's little reason to go back. I know opinions are divided but I've only appreciated Kerbal more with each new release.

At least Kenlie looks happy, glad to see he wasn't too badly shaken by his ordeal.

Yeah, that and regular copies of your save dir, it's not that hard to find. I once lost a two month career when the persistence went corrupt on a game crash and I didn't realize that confirming to remove the corrupt save meant it would remove all saves under that profile, not just the corrupt persistence. That won't happen again. Just remember what Al says...

Oh, Kenlie soooo deserves his own story line, even if it's just a short one...

Oww, that was just plain evil. Jeb and Bill owe him a dinner with Val for that at least.

I don't think so. I am sure I finished this with a splash down, and it did compete so I'm guessing it's the 10s stability criterion tbarcello mentioned that's causing it.

That doesn't sound half bad. Instead of the orange heroes doing daring deeds, it could be just some foot soldiers muddling along on a not-so-glamorous mission in a rickety ship. I'd read that.

Loved the inset on the last page with the updated Duna ore bust! signature image. Hope whatever happens next won't break poor Kenlies heart...

Oh dear... When I've established my mining rigs can harvest and bring resources to my in-orbit ISRU/refueling station, I'll never do it again and just hyperedit full resources to any vessel that manages to dock. I cannot face the consequences of my mistakes: If I mess up and get a ship stranded with too little fuel and no convenient save to return to, I cheat in some extra fuel and pretend I never made that mistake. I've never ever let a kerbal rest in peace. Once, when Valentina crashed into minmus because I completely forgot about that mission and the correction burn I needed to do (last week), I hacked my save to drag her back to active duty because I couldn't live with the guilt. When I forgot to test or add some important part to my ship (like that time I blocked the crew hatch with a parachute) I put a fixed copy of it on the launchpad and hyperedit it to to a rendezvous to replace the original. Now I can't look at the vessel logs because they prove I'm a fraud... I put kerbals that I suspect are romantically involved in the same crews and have them man space stations or bases, away from the stress and dangers of everyday service. It makes me feel less guilty about stranding them in the middle of nowhere. I think Val and Jeb are competing with each other, and I try my best to give them an equal share of high profile missions, but sometimes I neglect Bill who must have ambitions as well. I use the Diverse Kerbal heads mod and I suspect Bob's getting to old for this ####.

I'll usually test some new idea or techniques in little proof of concept crafts first that more often than not never even get of the runway. When it comes to launches though I'll shamelessly revert flight as often as I have to (either due to some catastrophe or because I only noticed I bolted that landing gear upside down when I jettison the fairings), and tell myself it was a simulation.

I get the feeling parkaboys graphic novel mission report has run into the same bug.

So I decided I'd go to Duna for the first time (in 0.24), built this crazy tug that went up in pieces (frame with control and crew sections, all 6 LV-N engine pods, radially attached drop tanks, a lander truck with a science lab, a big orange kethane driller/tanker that lands horizontally for Ike, and my ssto). Spent around 21 evenings building and testing and shaving and tweaking all those bits, then orbiting all pieces and docking over and over again. To crown it, this ssto, that could harvest kethane and had this attachment system for these science pods that you can see there in the middle, so I could rip all the science one biome at a time. Must have spent 7 nights just tweaking that ssto alone. Here's the whole glorious thing, Duna glinting in the background. Do you see that wonderful ssto? Noticed the engines? That's right, they're whiplashes. Needless to say, that first crew to take it down to Dunas surface stayed there for a while and I learned Duna != Mars.

I don't think so, and it's just the missions, the staff you can hire is pretty much 50-50. I've done about 20 rescue missions and never a male. So the chance of a streak like that is 50% to-the-power-of 20 which is 0,000000953, or almost exactly one in a million. And there's about half a dozen more of us. It's a bug alright, though pretty benign, and I've decided that it's because with every new save I start, I get a different Kerbin out of the infinite Kerbins in the kerniverse, and on this one they have a very different biology.

Same thing for me, lots of damsels in distress. I tend recruit get my crew by rescues exclusively, and my crew roster is looking like a Japanese dating sim. All rescues that are generated are damsels. I remember it working correctly on 1.002 but I lost the save so I couldn't check if it's something that happens only when you start a new carreer. Perhaps the Kerbals are evolving a skewed gender ration to deal with the recent mass extinction event caused by those mysterious rains of burning debris?

I don't really see that. I've got a stock mk2 ssto, with a payload consisting of a cockpit, passenger cabin and MK2 inline docking port, that runs to almost mach5 around 20km if I start my run almost level at 10km (that's around 1400m/s I think). From there it's just a short rocket kick to orbit. Not as fast as you could get in 0.9 but then again I ran mach 7 with an ssto with an unshielded docking port as a nose there so that made no sense. It's certainly not overpowered with a TWR that only goes over 1 when supersonic between 10 and 20km; it's got 3 rapiers to get 95% to orbit, and a single LV-N to get the rest of the way and have nearly 2km/s left to get to Mun or Minmus and back with ease. For fuel it's got a full pair of Big-S wings and strakes, an MK2 LF fuselage, and three MK1 LF fuselage, and for the rocket phase a short mk2 to 1.25 adapter and three flt400s, and air comes from 3 ram intakes. It even looks the parts of a supersonic jet. Key for me was not to try and hug the edge of the atmosphere and squeeze every last m/s out of your airbreathing cycle as I did with pre 1.000, but build up your run between 10 and 20 km altitude and keep that momentum going on rockets as soon as the intakes cut out, then pitching up slowly as to not introduce to much drag. Big ones aren't much harder, before this one I built a 160t MK3 with ISRU and all science equipment that flew out to Minmus for a refuel, and will go to Layte next transfer window. It gets to orbit with little trouble as well.

Quite a ride indeed. Thanks so much for putting this together, and please tell me you've got something lined up to follow up eve order zero...

They're pretty sturdy, I've put them on a huge 160 ton ssto plane and they never got a temp gauge either doing a powered mach 4.5 or during reentry after LKO. From the excellent advise of both Val and GoSlashy27 and many others in different threads, I was able to figure out how to ssto and my third attempt was this huge MK3 based thing that gets to orbit with oodles of dV to spare (enough to get to low minmus orbit, and there to refuel for the trip out to Jool). It does so on just 6 rapiers, 4 whiplashes and 2 LV-Ns (who are just there for the interplanetary bit and hardly contribute at all to getting in orbit. Engine types/ratio suggested by goslashy27 btw, thanks it works like a charm. My second successful SSTO was an R2 with four rapiers and two LV-Ns (one of which I could have probably dropped) for engines, with a cockpit, passenger cabin and the mk2 docking port as payload. It easily reaches orbit with 2 km/s of dV left in the tanks, and only uses a pair of Big-S delta wings and a pair of canards for lift. Less really is more.

Hehe. I've also seen them show up as debris in orbit once or twice in the mission control window, but never reaching up to rip off bits.

Well kudos to whomever made what up, I'm just glad I wasn't drinking coffee when I read that or I would've needed a new keyboard... 😄

True enough, although they're also usually located a lot closer to the CoM, so I wonder if that doesn't give the front wheel a longer lever arm and thus any disturbing forces (because of side slip for instance) there more torque, and the rear gears stabilizing force less torque (torque being arm times force). It been a while since classical mechanics so I'm not sure if that makes sense? I did have several planes where the different ratios did improve stability.

Just out of interest, what other visual mode are you running?

Nice. Can I recommend putting the brake torque in the rear landing gear to a higher value than on your front gear (or disable at front)? That way your CoM will tend to want to be in front of your rear gear as that drags back harder, which should help manage side slip (thanks for that term as well didn't know it was called that).

I think Kuzzter build an interesting take on VTOL that seems to perform well in his "Duna ore bust" series, using vernors (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/122280-Duna-Ore-Bust%21-a-KSP-Graphic-Novel-%28Ch6-Pg14-Once-again-your-Friday-cliffhanger-%29). I tried that idea out on the Mun and it landed very, very smoothly (stick a docking port on the belly, select "control from here", track SAS (in surface mode) to prograde, enable RCS and just pulse your translate-back key to land. Nice thing is that they'll also help in stabilizing the craft if there's a bit of an unbalance. Takeoff even easier, revert control back to cockpit, press translate-up and point your nose where you want to go, then full throttle and you're off. You may need a lot of them though if you've got a big ship or are on a high g world. RCS build aid mod makes placing them very easy. Edit: fixed stupid mistakes and typos.

Put rover wheels on your lander, that way even if you're off by a km or so, you can easily drive up to your base. Minmus is so lo-g that most engines will have enough impulse to make due, and some will probably manage on RCS alone. As to easy soft landings, put your navball reference to "surface" and have SAS point to retrograde, then you can easily and efficiently throttle your way down (Kerbal Engineer has a "suicide burn" counter that tells you exactly when to burn (as in meters left to the point where you need to start your burn), I often use that as an indicator). Edit: or use one of the other excellent suggestions mentioned above.